


Desperate Souls

by virtueofvice



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Drama, F/M, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-28
Updated: 2016-12-28
Packaged: 2018-09-12 19:55:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9087955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/virtueofvice/pseuds/virtueofvice
Summary: Two opposing forces struggling to survive find they have more in common than they'd thought.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dietplainlite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dietplainlite/gifts).



In the end, we always kill our heroes. Luke Skywalker returned to the Resistance, such as he was, a broken old man with broken dreams weighing heavy on his back. The grey robe he wore constantly betrayed the change in his ideology, and he refused to reclaim the saber that was rightfully his. Since it had called to her, first, Rey kept it by her side when she abandoned his halfhearted tutelage and set off on her own once more. 

The red giant loomed large in the distance beyond her shuttle's viewscreen, the sullen glow like a warning light to turn her back on the small and desolate solar system. In ages past, the handful of spinning pebbles orbiting a throbbing sun had seen its fair share of violence and bloodshed, as the galaxy's original darkness swept past and, having swallowed all indigenous life, spat it out again when nothing of value was found. The tiny planet Rey had her gimlet eye on didn't even have the dignity of a name - only a dense, metal-rich crust and a thin atmosphere; tidal locked with the sun, one side was a murky primordial subtropic, one side a frozen hellscape. The rattletrap shuttle she'd borrowed - lenient use of the word - from another system was little better than an empty rations canister, nor half the the interstellar jack-be-nimble juggernaut that the Falcon was... But the Falcon required a co-pilot, and she wanted to be alone. As isolated as possible, with only her thoughts for company - and the stern but enticing Darkness at the back of her head. Not mind, but head, because that's where she felt it, like the warm pressure of a large hand at the base of her skull, or the scent of leather and crackle of an unstable laser inches from her cheek - literal and real. 

_Speak of the Devil..._ Ren's shuttle was not as swift and cleverly elusive as her own, nor as imposing as a First Order warship or one of the old Imperial destroyers - but what it lacked in subterfuge it made up for in endurance. Sleek and dark, it cut across the stars like her own personal shadow, dogging her across lightyears with the patient, effortless exactitude of a single-minded man. He did not sneak and prowl and seek out the element of surprise like a hunting cat; rather he kept pace for days and wore her down, waiting for exhaustion and the unforgiving hardship of uninhabited space to do the hunting for him. A lone wolf, with patience the most finely honed weapon in his arsenal. Alone in the cockpit of her own shuttle, Rey cursed him aloud with the vilest insults she could fathom. From that lingering dark passenger, a rustle and a sneer - for the reprobate speech came with an edge of grudging respect for tenacity. _One desperate soul to another._

The shuttle's predictably intractable warp drive sputtered, whined, and failed while in orbit over the planet's dark icy back, leaving her with two equally unappealing options - hover silently with only basic thrusters to maneuver, or plummet toward the surface like a swan in freefall if she wished to avoid Ren's keen dark talons hot on her tail.   
It was a simple choice, really. Starvation, thirst, fickle chance - she had faced death many times, and feared it far less than the hot burning shame of defeat and captivity. Tilting the shuttle's nose down, she killed the stabilizing thrusters and felt herself fall.

* * *

On the side of the planet facing the sun, hot quagmires spawned forth terrifying monstrosities eager to consume one another and anything else. The red sun glowed constantly, illuminating the ancient and everlasting violence in a wash of blood. 

On the frozen dark side, nothing lived. With no vegetation, and centuries of whipping winds grinding the terraform to a flattened waste, there was nothing to block the daggers of cold that pierced her thin clothing and the flesh beneath it. The snow was savage, tiny ice crystals that scraped across her corneas like infinitesimal bitter diamonds, clinging to her lashes; and split the individual cells of her face on jagged frozen blades thinner than a hair, turning her cheeks to a punished rosy red. She staggered, then fell, and then again - on her knees into a snow drift, while the cruel winds eddied about and played with the mountain of white. 

Desperation is the mother of invention, and with numb fingers she drew the Skywalker saber, blue light flashing into being against the stark grey-white of her surroundings. The light was deceptive and unreliable, the ground a shifting dirty grey mottled with drifting pale, the sky a dark crimson, everything bathed in a wavering refracted glow from the dying sun and the shattered moon at the outer limits. She took a moment to brace herself, eyeing the mound cautiously, then with a single sweep bored a hole and dove in; hands and feet scrabbling like an animal's to widen the space, powder flying out behind her into the wind. She had no shovel but the Force is strongest in privation, and so she was at first amazed by her own might when the snow thudded into a hollow space around her as if pressed by a giant fist. But the flare of power was short-lived, her natural skills still largely untrained and the cold choking her slowly. She had made a burrow to survive, like the instinct-driven desert creature she was, but she lacked the body heat and natural insulation to fill the space. Cutting herself off from the wind only bought her time, time she was no longer certain she wanted. The snow continued to fall around her hiding place, obscuring it and leaving her shivering in semi-blue darkness, resolved with steely resentment to freeze and die there. Both slim hands curved around the saber's grip in a grim stiffening claw. _Come and take it, if you can._

* * *

Time passed. Perhaps she slept. She wouldn't have known - she had never known that cold like this could exist. She had heard, in the taverns and markets of Jakku, from travelers to distant worlds, that freezing to death was just like falling asleep. She could imagine worse ways to die. She had seen them. She forced her eyes open and glared into the darkness. Something had stirred her. Perhaps it was the Darkness unfurling its wings. Perhaps it was only the final beats of her heart tattooing out a fragile farewell. 

The sky broke open and her nightmare was silhouetted there, a ranging black figure against a spiraling scarlet night, and on instinct the saber's light flashed into existence as she brought the weapon to bear. Angry and red, another saber met it, pressing down with inexorable force against her numb and frozen muscles. She hissed like a cornered cat, trembling blue lips drawn back from her chattering teeth. 

"Fight me and you'll die here." Ren's voice growled from inside the climate-controlled mask, impossible to read as ever, every emotion distorted and smothered in black. 

"Then I'll die." She returned, lips barely moving in a face white like porcelain and red like roses. She lunged forward and the dark figure drew back with a hiss, the saber's glowing cerulean tip meeting sizzling resistance. But he raised a hand and she felt her body's reserves burn up like a puff of flame on high-test propellant; a brilliant flash of resistance, then nothing. When the Darkness swallowed her up she was so cold she hardly noticed.

* * *

She had not been difficult to find. 

Since that long moment on Starkiller - the strategic failure, the unbreakable stillness that haunted him still in dreams both waking and sleeping - he had possessed a window into her mind. Small, and guarded, but the link between the two was as a silken spider's thread - nearly invisible, nearly indestructible. He was not certain she had ever fully realized the extent of their link. If she had, she would have bent all of her not-insignificant raw power towards shattering it - and would likely be an empty husk now, frozen solid on an abandoned planet. 

His plan was shallow, instinctual, half-formed - but since the fall of Starkiller and the embarrassing defeat of the First Order's elite forces at the hands of a few rebels, he had been operating more and more outside the confines of protocol. He followed his intuition, and gave in to his dark side in ways the regimented commands of the First Order had not always encouraged. 

Her body against his was as thin as a bird's, as rangy as a jackal. He thought if he were to run his hands over her in her thin, frost-edged homespun clothes his fingertips would meet in quite a few places, so small was she held up against his towering frame. He stared at her for a long moment, lashes light in repose but brows still slightly knitted as if even in sleep she were ferocious. Her nose turned up ever so slightly at the tip, complimenting the freckles faint against her tan; and he knew that if she were to bare her teeth in a snarl - or a smile, he imagined, though could not verify - the lips that seemed just slightly too thin now would appear perfect and... even tempting. 

He almost dropped her in the snow, but Hux's sneering superior arrogance crept up and tapped him on the shoulder, warning against the recklessness of his actions, and he snarled. Ignoring the pain below his collarbone, he hoisted the girl and set off for his ship, both sabers holstered in his own belt.

The ship's life support system's were equipped to handle the basic needs of humanoids, but treating hypothermia was another matter. Boarding the vessel, he sealed the hatch and unburdened himself of the unconscious girl, depositing her on the berth in the tiny cabin. He tapped long gloved fingers over the climate control dials, raising the temperature a few degrees without overtaxing the ship's energy reserves, then seated himself in the cockpit. The shuttle stirred like a beast from slumber, shaking the snow from its burnished sides as it rose into the glowering sky, and then into the stars. 

Once in orbit over the planet, he killed the primary thrusters, leaving only the stabilizers in place, and turned in his seat to look at his prize. The hunter had made his kill, what he'd come for, and there was now no need to hurry anywhere. He savored the stillness for a moment, as he had once before, with the forbidden richness of guilt lingering on the back of his tongue. He could end the girl; keep the saber for himself and tip her out of the airlock like so much unneeded waste material...

But Rey remained, curled tight into a ball on the bunk of his own ship, skin paler than ever as her body's core clung to warmth and her forehead damp and jeweled with moisture where the frost in her hair had melted. Even in unconsciousness she had pulled herself into the fetal position and balled her hands into fists, protecting her vitals and ready to fight. He could feel the thread of her Force tenuously linked with his own, her power flickering dim but fervent within her. _Such potential._

He removed his mask, setting it down with a quiet but decisive clunk on the empty copilot's chair. The sabers he placed into the small but sturdy weapons safe; then hit the command sequence for cloaking and autopilot on the ship's controls. The scar she had left across his face was livid but seemed somehow to belong there, an illustration of the dichotomy that had always existed within the man born Ben Organa Solo. He stretched out on the ample bunk behind her, his body like a furnace beside her petite frame, and spread his black cloak over them both. 

* * *

Moment by moment, in repose, Rey's muscles relaxed as they were infused with warmth. She felt herself returning to consciousness as if from a great depth, swimming upwards towards a light that was more familiar than philosophical. Blinking slowly, she opened her weary eyes on a scene that she did not recognize but instantly knew, and tried at once to sit up - a caged beast, on her guard. 

Her body was trapped, heavy, wrapped in thick black fabric that smelled of smoke and solitude; senses dulled with cloying warmth. As she squirmed to free herself, an arm around her waist tightened and dragged her back firmly against a long, muscular frame, and a low grumble met her protesting curse. 

_Kylo Ren._

"Release me!" She snapped, putting the emphasis of her Force behind her words, and she was abruptly free, tumbling onto the shuttle's floor. Her body instantly mourned the loss of such warmth but she shoved the weakness away with the savagery reserved for true survivors and rolled to her feet -

Only to see the leader of the Knights of Ren, terror of the First Order, tangled in his own cloak, pale as death, and obviously ill. The small wound she herself had inflicted with her desperate saber lunge had festered into an ugly thing, visible through the charred hole in his clothing. An untreated wound, even cauterized, runs the risk of infection - even more so when it is exposed to exertion, temperature extremes and the irritating atmosphere of an uncharted planet. Unaccustomed to physical weakness, the knight had probably not even considered the small injury as a possible threat. 

And now he was brought low by that carelessness, delirious with fever as he looked at her with eyes so dilated she thought she might fall into them, dark iris swallowed by the darker center, deep space vertigo. 

"Rey," he rasped, and something about her name on his lips sent a shiver down her spine. Not _scavenger,_ not _girl,_ but simply _Rey_. All she had; all she had been left with. 

"You have eyes like my mother's," he chuckled, rolling prone onto his back as if presenting himself as a sacrifice. "Could kill a man with a look." Then he hissed, one hand curling into a fist as the wound she'd inflicted throbbed. Consciousness ran through his fingers like sand. He could not seem to hold onto it.

Rey eyed him. She could kill him. It would be easy. She had no idea why the saber was red when she imagined it, pressing into the broad expanse of his chest and giving forth an aroma like cooking meat. It would do them both good, to be honest - Kylo Ren had never seemed like a man overburdened with the joy of living. And she could then commandeer his ship, which was in far better repair than her own, and would be a fine prize for the Resistance... 

Except...

Except.

What good had the Resistance ever really done her?

When her life had been saved, the occasions on which a noble breast had been thrust before the blade to keep her from danger; those heroic acts had been taken on the part of individuals, who acted for their own reasons, and not as agents of the Republic. Friendship is a lovely thing, but whether it would put food in her belly or keep the wolf from her door remained in doubt. But the Resistance... The Resistance had, instead, sent her headlong into jeopardy at most every opportunity. All she had of the Resistance was danger, disappointment - a lifetime of desolate waiting, and a doll made from refuse, abandoned on a distant planet. 

A scavenger is a practical being. Surviving off scraps, it can consume almost anything, but is able to discern very quickly what is of value; what is inherently useful to its survival - and what is not. 

Bending, she pulled a tiny blade from her boot, a primitive thing hammered out from metal alloy and wrapped in leather to protect the hand that wielded it. The tip of the knife hovered over Ren's carotid for a long second, two - before slicing the front of his tunic neatly in two. She peeled the fabric away from his angry wound, noting a number of scars across the pale expanse of his chest, and stood on tiptoe to reach the medical kit stashed above the berth. 

When she brought the antiseptic swab to the wound, it stung him into consciousness, and he caught her wrist, dark eyes blazing with suspicion. "You can thank me later." She informed him curtly, and continued with her work with only the quiet humming of the ship and the silence between them for company. 

* * *

Piloting the shuttle with a companion proved to be an easier task, and it took very little time to find another, more hospitable planet on which to set down, check systems, and resupply. Cautiously, having now gone thirty-six hours without either party making an attempt on the other's life, Ren opened the weapons safe and retrieved his own saber, leaving it open for Rey to take Skywalker's. 

She picked it up, feeling its now-familiar weight in her hand, and raised a brow at the dark figure opposite her. His skin prickled, acutely aware of their Force bond, of the ship's confined quarters, of the constantly shifting and complicated nature of their association. 

Without warning she brought the weapon to bear, blue beam flashing into existence beside his face in a mocking imitation of their first meeting. He brought his up almost as swiftly, but there was no denying that she had gotten the better of him. He had let his guard down. 

"What will you do?" He asked, hating that he was not wearing his mask, that his emotions were exposed nakedly for all to see. The question was everything - would she fight him, now? Would she return to the Resistance? Set out alone, with nothing but the saber in her hand?

Rey smirked, reveling in the uncensored play of feeling across the aquiline features and deceptively soft eyes. Lowering her saber slowly, she pressed down on the lock and released the crystal's charge, disabling and holstering the weapon. "You said I need a teacher." She bent and picked up the pack she had prepared, intent on gathering supplies, and headed for the shuttle's hatch. 

Ren watched her, maintaining his bland expression through sheer force of will. The link between them hummed like a wire that has been stretched to its breaking point, a note only he could hear. 

Rey glanced back at him over her shoulder, something challenging in the cant of her hips and the glint in her eye. "Well? Teach me." And she leapt off the ramp and disappeared out of sight.


End file.
